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All the arguments against EVs are wrong
- ZeroGravitas 3y agoI get security errors in a couple of browsers, is it just me?: > https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/all-the-arguments-against-evs-are https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/all-the-arguments-against-evs-... has a security policy called HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS), which means that Firefox Nightly can only connect to it securely. You can’t add an exception to visit this site.
- abhi9u 3y agono, I didn't see this. I am on Google Chrome.
- jwilk 3y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20230514141525/https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/all-the-arguments-against-evs-are https://web.archive.org/web/20230514141525/https://www.noahp...
- jmclnx 3y agoI did not get this on the article, but I do get it every so often. I suspect it is that crappy cloudflare check people are using these days.
- ZeroGravitas 3y ago> Nor are those worries solely the province of cranks and ideologues — Simon Michaux of the Finnish Geological Survey has actually done extensive research On the contrary, Michaux tripped a few of my crank alarms, mention of EROEI being one of them.
- losvedir 3y agoWhat's wrong with EROEI (Energy Return on Energy Invested)? It seems sensible to me without knowing too much about it.
- ZeroGravitas 3y agohttps://bountifulenergy.blogspot.com/2016/06/eroei-is-unimportant-and-is-being-used.html https://bountifulenergy.blogspot.com/2016/06/eroei-is-unimpo... "ERoEI is unimportant and is being used incorrectly" > In this article I will show that ERoEI is unimportant by itself. It usually does not matter if ERoEI is increasing or decreasing. ERoEI provides no guidance about which sources of energy we should pursue, nor does it offer any guidance about how much net energy will be available to us in the future. By itself, ERoEI is a useless figure, unless it is lower than 1, which it almost never is. Although different sources of energy (such as coal or solar PV) have different ERoEI ratios, this means nothing important. More specifically, Michaux seems unaware that renewables have overtaken fossil sources in terms of EROEI so even if you think it's a useful measure, you need to use really out of date sources to calculate that renewables lose on this metric: https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022-11-10/eroi-of-re/ https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022-11-10/eroi-of-re/ and the paper that the above podcast discusses: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/12/7098/htm https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/12/7098/htm
- VintageCool 3y agoMichaux's paper starts with the assumption that it would take about 4 weeks worth of batteries to survive the Finnish winter, and therefore every grid in the world will need 4 weeks worth of batteries. Despite a writing a hundred page paper covering basic details of existing power generation technologies, he devotes only about a paragraph to establishing that assumption. Additionally, there is a section dedicated to ocean shipping. Routes are currently chosen to minimize costs, traveling long distances on bunker fuel. Running those same routes on batteries would be prohibitively expensive. Instead of concluding that in the future we will do ocean shipping differently because the cost minimization will work out differently, Michaux simply adds that to the tab of batteries that we would need to decarbonize.
- pfdietz 3y agoOne of the now classic crank moves in analyzing a renewable grid is assuming batteries are the only storage technology. It's so common I have to feel it's intentional. Using batteries for rare event backups is an incredibly stupid design. E-fuels such as hydrogen are much better. For intermediate term storage (up to, say, a week) there are other options, such as thermal storage.
- gnicholas 3y agoI only skimmed it but didn’t see any mention of the argument that our electrical grid is not reliable and resilient enough to support a massive uptick of EVs. At least in CA, where the power company likes to preemptively turn off power so that fires don’t start, that’s a big concern for families with only one car, or considering replacing their second car with an EV.
- Memetoml 3y agoWasn't there just a gas shortage in France and half a year ago in UK? How constant and long lasting are your power outages there? I mean no electricity for a week and all my food in the freezer is gone, no heating in winter due to pumps needing electricity and no water as well. Sounds really bad over there then?
- mattlondon 3y agoGas as in gas (that you heat your house with), or gas as in petroleum (that you put in your car)? For both in the UK I don't think there were "shortages" where it wasn't available. Both just shoot up in price (like they always do at the merest hint of supply shortages or whalesale cost increases ..)
- mecsred 3y agoWhy does the UK call gasoline petroleum? Every context I've ever heard it used in, including technical, petroleum is crude oil, which DEFINITELY doesn't go in your car.
- mattlondon 3y agoWell equally why does the US call the liquid you put in your car gas? :) No one calls it petroleum - petrol is what anyone on the street would call it. Diesel is different and just called diesel. I don't know why or how this started - guessing some old thing that wasn't-quite-right but which stuck around regardless
- sowbug 3y agoI've been going in range-anxiety circles with my dad for over 10 years. He insists he needs a car that can take him hundreds of miles into the wilderness for camping. I ask whether he's ever done that. He says no, but he intends to. He's 84. EV manufacturers should offer the 500-mile-range vehicle, but as an option. Pay $X for a car with 250 miles range, and an extra $20,000 for another 250 miles range. Most people will look at that price difference and conclude that their need to drive 8 hours without a pee break is and always will be aspirational.
- revertmean 3y agoTo be honest, I think I would just let this one go. Does your father, at 84, really need a new car anyway?
- sowbug 3y agoBelieve me, I'd love to talk with my dad about something else. But if it's not the 1950s, getting a new car, or what my mom is most recently wrong about, he's not interested.
- mattlondon 3y agoI think this is pretty much what they all do already? Seems like most manufacturers offer a "long range" version? Perhaps not 250 Vs 500, but certainly like 150 to 250 sort of order of magnitude Take a look at http://ev-database.uk http://ev-database.uk
- leetcrew 3y agoright, businesses love opportunities to create market segmentation, and they seem to already do this to the extent it's reasonable with battery capacity. I think the limiting factor here is that the battery pack already makes up a large fraction of the total mass and volume of the vehicle. once you've designed a chassis and suspension suitable for a 500 kWh battery pack, it doesn't really make sense to offer it with half or less of that capacity. you can't offer it at the discount that people would expect.
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- vsskanth 3y agoYeah, this entire article has a single mention of "charging infrastructure", and even that's a passing reference. This doesn't address all the arguments against an EV. The fact of the matter is, if I don't have a Tesla and rent my apartment, I won't be able to reliably charge this vehicle. Even for someone with a house, long trips face unreliable charging infrastructure. It's gonna take a few more years
- LeifCarrotson 3y agoConversely, if I own my home, with an attached garage, and especially if my spouse has a gasoline vehicle we would use for long trips, then charging infrastructure and range over ~80 miles are largely irrelevant to me. Being a perfect vehicle for 2/3rds of the population is good enough for now.
- vsskanth 3y agoAgreed. EVs are a great second commuter vehicle for someone with a garage.
- TheLoafOfBread 3y ago50% of people in EU are living in apartments. So it is not 66%
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoMuch of Europe doesn’t have free street parking like the states does, a lot of those people don’t have cars or are paying extra to have their cars garaged.
- lukeschlather 3y agoTeslas are pretty expensive and charging infrastructure is very cheap. If you can afford a Tesla you can afford to rent a parking space and get it outfitted with a charger. If this sounds impractical to you it's not because the charging infrastructure is too expensive, it's because the parking space is too expensive.
- justinator 3y agoThey didn't touch upon tire/rubber particulate pollution being worse for EVs.
- aresant 3y agoIs there a referenceable starting point regarding this point?
- justinator 3y agoEVs being heavier generally wear tires faster than conventional cars.
- konschubert 3y agoIs there any evidence that this is an actual issue? My understanding was that the particulates from tires are pretty big and don’t really go airborne
- justinator 3y ago"There is emerging evidence that tyre wear particles and other particulate matter may contribute to a range of negative health impacts including heart, lung, developmental, reproductive, and cancer outcomes." https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/02/230222210553.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/02/230222210553.h...
- r00fus 3y agoBut EVs being worse is handwaved away in the article without any hard data: “ Some are concerned that electric vehicles tend to be heavier, which might increase tyre wear” That’s a fact-free argument.
- justinator 3y agoOne could postulate that cars in general aren't all that great for the environment and in this topic, no matter the power source. Replacing 1:1 gas to EVs is maybe a lateral move. Maybe what we need to do is have less cars, and drive those cars less.
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- Lammy 3y agoI just don't want one, and my likes and desires are not up for debate and can't be """wrong""" lol
- CoastalCoder 3y agoIf you consider your likes and desires be truly axiomatic / inscrutable, then you're probably correct.
- pfdietz 3y agoThere are all sorts of things people like that they can't have. You're going to be unhappy. Sorry not sorry.
- jmclnx 3y agoFor warm climates in urban areas, I can agree, but here are things never fully covered anywhere: 1. Heat in the winter, this will reduce you range, some just a little, but in places like Minnesota in Feb, a lot. 2. Stuck in traffic. If you are stuck in grid lock, that will cut in range, there have been cases were gridlock could last hours. Granted maybe EV stop power usage in this case. But under very hot or cold weather, you will lose AC and Heat. So if you have health concerns, TFB. 3. Battery recycling and disposal. Once EVs become common, I can see people being charged disposal costs for old batteries. In this case, I can see old batteries being tossed out backyards in rural. Anyone remember piles of tires sitting in people's yards 40+ years ago ? 4. Old EVs may need battery replacement, I can see this being very expensive for poor people To me, better off moving to very good public transportation. Up until say the 1960s, people would travel via buses and trains, even for long distance. Now that is impossible. My Aunt (90+ years old) would take a train from a very rural town to the local small city on weekends for dancing and things like that in her teens/20s. That town no longer has public transportation anywhere even though its population is 30x times the size now. Time to bring that back everywhere. For a somewhat decent system (to not as good as 70 years ago), see NY State Train routes. People still use that to get to NYC from rather long distances.
- vmladenov 3y ago> Stuck in traffic. If you are stuck in grid lock, that will cut in range, there have been cases were gridlock could last hours. This is just abjectly wrong. The absolutely best use case for an EV is during gridlock. You can run the heater on a (pre-heat pump) Model 3 for something like 2 days in 15F weather, and people have hypermiled it to 600 miles at 20-30mph. In gridlock you’re not expending any energy to idle the engine, so there’s no “cut” in range besides from the climate system. Far, far better than idling a combustion engine.
- bryanlarsen 3y agoIf you're worried about heat turn the cabin heater off and just run the seat heaters. You can run those for a month on half a battery.
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- funnymony 3y agoLets say EV cut co2 emissions by factor of 100x for each km traveled. Lets say number of cars in total follows exponential progression, 5% growth per year. It follows that after 100 years due to growth co2 gets back to original level. (Log100/log1.05=94) EVs are required bandaid, but degrowth will come eventually. (Possibly due to climate change supply will decrease and so will consumption)
- TheLoafOfBread 3y agoSorry, degrowth is a nonsense, unless you want to see millions of people dead due to mass famine thanks to deindustrialization which needs to go hand in hand with degrowth.
- pg314 3y agoWhy would the number of cars grow by 5% for the next 100 years? Currently there are 1.4 billion cars. Projections say the world population will peak at 10 billion. Even if everyone would have a car, that’s only a sevenfold increase.
- viernullvier 3y agoThose estimates are unrealistic regardless of any potential degrowth scenario. You'll run out of drivers and/or roads way before the 100 year mark.
- funnymony 3y agoI must concede: 1000x increase in driver count is too far fetched. Though if forever growth is assumed, and goal post is moved to co2 total instead of per km, then some options exist to eat up that 1000x saving: Owning more than one vehicle per person, buying new automobile more frequently, moving to bigger, better and powerfuler cars.
- bryanlarsen 3y agoThe number of vehicles sold per year is going down, not up.
- sebow 3y agoHere's the biggest and most important reason (besides the obvious ones like grids, energy, etc.): most people >cannot< afford an EV compared to say, a SH good(and often better) vehicle. EVs are not even competitive to their equivalent fossil-based cars that are new. Idealists should often take their heads out of their asses and understand most people don't have their privilege, ironically the most privileged ones screech about privilege while ignoring their own. Go ahead and tell developing countries to switch to EV-only, setting them back at least 10 years in terms of industry and economic growth.
- TheLoafOfBread 3y agoAs an owner of BEV, this is correct. I was able to afford Enyaq for cca 60k EUR. And if you can't charge at home, then you are charging on public chargers for _more money_ than you would be taking gas in similar ICE. And on top of that you are subjected to stupid applications and waste much more time to actually get the charge. You are essentially paying premium to get less. And idealists are surprised that people ain't thrilled from BEV future.
- theshrike79 3y agoWhat people forget in these calculations is that many (not all) countries can produce the electricity for EVs themselves. Very few countries can produce gasoline and diesel in-house so to speak. The actual raw oil needs to be bought from a dictator somewhere (or Norway), processed by a company that takes their cut and transported all the way to their country + distributed everywhere, every step adds more cost and most of the money doesn't end up in the country buying the gasoline/diesel. You can make electricity anywhere and it's not that hard to store on a small scale and the people moving the electrons pay taxes to your country, as do the companies employing them. Less money going abroad, more staying in the country is good for everyone except oil companies. --- I, for one, can afford my EV because I can offset my loan payment from the money I save from not having to spend around 200€/month on gasoline (it's ~2€/litre here). Instead I charge it at home with electricity that has cost 0-10c/kWh for the last few months. I went from 10€/100km to ~1,5-2€/100km in driving costs. With a bit of code (or a service like Gridio), I can optimise that to only charge the car when the electricity is the cheapest. And I live in an apartment building.
- CensoredInSF 3y ago[flagged]
- charcircuit 3y agoHow about on this one: Gasoline has a higher energy density than lithium ion batteries meaning that you will have less weight to carry around giving you a more nimble vehicle. It also lets you accelerate faster from the same engine torque since you have to accelerate less mass. With electric vehicles you have to carry a battery for you entire range and it is not easy to swap out.
- oblio 3y agoThat's partly balanced out by the greater engine efficiency, 90-95% versus 30-35-40%. Also regenerative braking. Oh, and much better engine efficiency at low speeds.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- theshrike79 3y agoNo gasoline engine has 35% or better efficiency. I think the Toyota Hybrids hover around 30%.
- oblio 3y agoDiesel engines are more efficient.
- rini17 3y agoAuthor cites Hannah Ritchie who insists on comparing billions of tons of raw fossil fuels vs. millions of tons of REFINED metals. Not vs. raw metal ores - that would be half the tonnage of fossils already. It is handwaved away in the discussion below the Ritchie's article as "armchair concerns" and "minor part" and "we don't know exactly". I think such serious topic deserves more intellectually honest analysis.
- abhi9u 3y agoYes, that's a fair point.